Dispatches From the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice [Hardcover]

A collection of four essays, with preface and afterword, by lawyer Gareth Peirce. Just over 100 pages. If every British politician read these essays - and preferably re-read them regularly - this country would be a much better place. How politicians have time and again condoned torture and injustice brings shame on all of us. While most of the material is fairly well known, the cumulative effect of Gareth Peirce's wide-ranging and thoughtful arguments is immense, frightening, yet she ends by asking "is it false optimism constantly to assert that there are rights, and that they are inalienable?" This is an important book.

This collection of essays completely demolishes any claim the UK has to upholding human rights or the rule of law.

Looking at the UK's complicity in torture and 'rendition' and the scandalous cover-up of the truth of the Lockerbie bombing (and the framing of al-Megrahi), it is a sickening read. It is also very short, and looks only at the UK, so is not a complete overview of the subject (as another reviewer points).

As a polemic, though, it is phenomenal.

This is a fine collection of essays by lawyer Gareth Peirce. Together, they make the case that the British government has been complicit in the US state's recent crimes against humanity: rendition, indefinite detention without trial, and torture.

In the first essay, `Make sure you say that you were treated properly', written in May 2009, Peirce notes that the High Court commented that the British government's role in Binyam Mohamed's rendition and torture went `far beyond that of a bystander'. She notes the complicity of the British government at every stage of his ordeal.

The UN's special rapporteur said that states "are responsible where they knowingly engage in, render aid to or assist in the commission of internationally wrongful acts, including violations of human rights." British intelligence personnel conducted or witnessed more than 2,000 interviews in prisons in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Iraq where detainees' rights were flagrantly violated. As the UN rapporteur observed, "the continuous engagement of foreign officials in some instances constituted a form of encouragement or even support."
In the second essay, The framing of al-Megrahi, written in September 2009, Peirce questions the justice of the trial in 2000 of the Libyan citizen Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the Lockerbie bombing of 1988. Dr Hans Koechler, the UN's observer, said the trial was `not fair', writing, "the guilty verdict in the case of the first accused [al-Megrahi] is particularly incomprehensible in view of the admission by the judges themselves that the identification of the first accused by the Maltese shop owner was `not absolute' ... and that there was a `mass of conflicting evidence'."
Koechler wrote, "the presence of at least two representatives of a foreign government in the courtroom during the entire period of the trial was highly problematic. The two state prosecutors from the US Department of Justice were seated next to the prosecution team. They were not listed in any of the official information documents about the Court's officers produced by the Scottish Court Service, yet they were seen talking to the prosecutors while the Court was in session, checking notes and passing on documents." As he noted, "the presence of foreign governments in a Scottish courtroom (in any courtroom for that matter) jeopardises the independence and integrity of legal procedures and is not in conformity with the general standards of fairness."
The key scientific witness in the trial had earlier been banned from being called as an expert witness. Koechler wrote, "A general pattern of the trial consisted in the fact that virtually all people presented by the prosecution as key witnesses were proven to lack credibility to a very high extent, in certain cases even having openly lied to the Court."
Koechler concluded, "there is not one single piece of material evidence linking the two accused to the crime. In such a context, the guilty verdict in regard to the first accused appears to be arbitrary, even irrational." He also described the dismissal of al-Megrahi's appeal in March 2002 as a `spectacular miscarriage of justice'. We still need a full public inquiry into the bombing.
In the third essay, Was it like this for the Irish?, written in April 2008, Peirce points out that for 30 years the British state interned innocent Irish people, used torture (hooding, extreme stress positions), brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence. These methods were counter-productive, as well as immoral and illegal.

In the fourth essay, Are we our brothers' keepers?, written in May 2010, Peirce proposes that we should never let any of our citizens be sent to the USA. She believes that we cannot trust US assurances, given that the US state systematically uses torture in interrogation, that it uses military courts to try civilians, that it inflicts indefinite imprisonment without trial and that it imposes arbitrary and extreme sentences. It regularly threatens 100-year sentences, so it is not surprising that guilty pleas end 97 per cent of US trials. The USA has an estimated 40,000 prisoners in solitary confinement, which is torture.

In a postscript, written in August 2010, Peirce points out that the British Cabinet was responsible for the killings of 14 unarmed civilians in Derry on 30 January 1972, `Bloody Sunday', because it ordered the Paras to police the civil rights march, knowing that the Paras had, six months earlier, killed 11 innocent civilians in Ballymurphy.